The battle is no different for golf, regardless of whether you're attracted to the little white ball as a recreational pursuit, or take more than a passing interest in goings on in the professional game.

Golf administrators in recent times have also tossed around the concept of a shot clock to avoid unnecessary procrastination on the tour. Just as the world's best tennis players need to complete their serve within a specified time and basketball teams need to throw up a shot before the clock expires, should golfers also be subject to a time restriction, say 30 or 40 seconds, to size up their ball before letting loose?

There's some movement on the European Tour, with next year's Austrian Open set to be the first professional tournament to implement a shot clock policy - for every shot played - in an attempt to combat slow play. To accentuate the experiment, the tournament will be known as the Shot Clock Masters. There are estimates that a time restriction will cut round times by about 45 minutes, reducing three-ball times - groups of three players - to about four hours and pairings to as little as three hours and 15 minutes.

Under the rules for Austria next June, each player in the 120-man field will have 50 seconds for the first player in a group to play any shot and 40 seconds for subsequent players. Golfers will occur a one-shot penalty for time indiscretions and these will show as a red card against their name. Adding to the complexity and recognising that some tricky golf shots simply demand more preparation time than others, players will also be able to call two time-outs during their round, permitting them twice the allocated time for those shots.

The debate about a shot clock has been bubbling around the Australian golf scene for some time.

Andrew Langford-Jones, the PGA of Australia's director of tournaments, admits it's a vexing issue but professional golfers need to realise they are competing with other sports for the eyes, ears and ultimately the paying dollar of fans and sponsors.

"We've got to understand for golf to move forward, and there's becoming a greater acceptance of this, is that the professional golfers of the world are part of the entertainment industry, and the moment they stop being entertaining is the moment that sponsors will turn to other sports," Langford-Jones said.

"It's a balancing act between what's best for golf, what's good for the members, what's best for TV - because that drives the dollars. Sometimes it doesn't suit television to play too quick, because if everything goes haywire and they play too quickly it gives the broadcasters 45 minutes or an hour to fill at the end of the day, which is also a problem from a scheduling point of view.

"Certainly in amateur golf I would favour just having a rule, I don't know how you'd enforce it, because you haven't got [tournament] officials out there with every group.

"I mean 30 seconds is an inordinate amount of time for someone to take to play a shot. As a result when we play amateur golf we normally play in four balls, or three balls, and rarely go over four hours if it's being administered properly."

Should speedier rounds come into tournament play, some of the scheduling quandaries revolve around field sizes. With a field of 144 players, for example, that means there would be 48 three-balls - 24 groups set for the morning and 24 for a later start. There would be more chance of a backlog with groups getting around their first nine holes much quicker. It's not ideal and may mean that reduced tournament fields are the best outcome.

"Players don't want to argue themselves out of a job because to make a shot clock a viable option they need to have smaller tournament fields," Langford-Jones says.

"Most of the tournaments or most of the 72-hole tournaments around the world are ultimately controlled by the players themselves, the TPC [the tournament player committees] and being member organisations, there is also a responsibility to the members, rather than just the players themselves, or just the game itself."

It's not so much that the clock is ticking, but golfing administrators, like all sports managers, need to be cognisant that the ground doesn't shift under their watch.